Could A Middle-Aged White Man Ever Become President?

Dreading another Clinton? Looking for a political problem solver? Ex-Maryland governor Martin O’Malley wants to be your guy. But if facing Hurricane Hillary weren't enough, he's now discovering that the very thing that once made him seem presidential suddenly threatens to ruin him. Jason Zengerle on how running for president is harder than it looks on TV

Martin O'Malley was standing on a chair, shouting in a dark bar in Iowa City. He may have been nearly a thousand miles from Baltimore, but for him, that wasn't far enough.

It was a stormy summer evening, and about 150 people had come to hear O'Malley make the case that he should be president—a case that had gotten frustratingly tricky. Not that long ago, O'Malley, the former governor of Maryland and a perpetually rising star in Democratic politics, seemed like the no-brainer alternative to Hillary Clinton. “The best manager working in government today,” the Washington Monthly called him, a problem solver who had slashed crime as mayor of Baltimore. But now those rosy urban achievements had taken on the stink of controversy, complicating his pitch for the presidency.

A young woman in a peasant skirt raised her hand. “As mayor of Baltimore, you oversaw an era of mass arrests of nonviolent offenders,” she told the candidate, citing statistics—“110,000 arrests were made in one year in a city of 620,000 people”—before getting to her question. “What are we supposed to expect from you on the issue of mass incarceration and institutional racism?”

As he listened, O'Malley's smile grew forced and his jaw began to bulge. He has a temper. Plus, he doesn't like to be called out. As mayor, O'Malley once paid a visit to a couple of radio hosts criticizing him for being insufficiently concerned about crime. “Come outside after the show,” he scolded them, “and I'll kick your ass.”

Now, in Iowa City, O'Malley seemed on the verge of unloading again. He'd been on edge since April, when riots erupted in Baltimore after cops were implicated in the killing of an unarmed black man named Freddie Gray. Years of mistrust between the city's police and its black citizens were glaringly exposed—and suddenly the two terms O'Malley spent as the city's mayor from 1999 to 2007 were subject to brutal re-examination. O'Malley—who had always taken plenty of credit for slowing crime by employing tough “zero tolerance” policing techniques—found himself being blamed for the city's racial acrimony.

David Simon, the former Baltimore Sun reporter and creator of The Wire, declaimed that “the stake through the heart of police procedure in Baltimore was Martin O'Malley.” On Meet the Press, Chuck Todd incredulously asked O'Malley, “Do you think you can still run on your record as mayor of Baltimore, governor of Maryland, given all this?” And when O'Malley launched his presidential campaign, protesters crashed the festivities, chanting “Black Lives Matter” and burnishing NOMALLEY signs. In the wake of police violence in Ferguson, Cleveland, New York, and now Baltimore, the old-school good-governance dictates about getting tough on crime seemed out of touch. Suddenly Democrats were scrambling to take up the mantle of police reform, and O'Malley was stranded on the wrong side of one of the defining issues for liberals today.

“You weren't in Baltimore in 1999, but I was,” he told the young woman, with more than a hint of contempt in his voice. “It looked more like Mexico City than an American city, and the gutters quite literally ran with blood.” There was no applause. These people didn't get it, he seemed to be thinking. What he'd done in Baltimore was worthy of their respect and not, as the woman in the peasant skirt suggested, part of “the long history of brutalization” of “communities of color.” He was the guy, he wanted to tell them, who could save those communities—the guy who knows that you don't stop criminals by asking politely and that turning around a city isn't as easy as replacing open-air drug markets with shabby-chic condos. But that kind of talk had fallen out of fashion. The political hand O'Malley had been planning to play was now a loser. The man who wanted to be president swallowed hard and tried to pivot to something else.

A week later, O'Malley was back in Baltimore, where he lives in a French Provincial house that he bought earlier this year for $550,000. It's a nice but modest place. When he was term-limited out of his job as governor in January, O'Malley didn't join a law firm or look to cash in. Instead, he took a part-time teaching gig at Johns Hopkins and got to work running for president. With his carefully parted gray hair and unwavering eye contact, it's hard to imagine the guy as anything other than a politician. It's hard for him to imagine it, too. O'Malley won his first election at 28 and for twenty-four years never left public office until this past January.

“He has no drive to make a lot of money,” O'Malley's wife, Katie, who herself is a district-court judge, told me as we sat on the porch. “And that's okay.”

“I have never heard her say that last part,” O'Malley interjected.

On one level, then, O'Malley's presidential run makes sense as the next step in a political career. But it's been horribly timed—and not just because of what's happened in Baltimore. After all, to run for president as a Democrat in 2016—and not be named Clinton—makes no sense at all. Which is why O'Malley's run has been greeted with suspicion of ulterior motives. Some assume he's laying the groundwork for a future presidential campaign. Others believe he's shooting to be Hillary's veep or to land a plum cabinet assignment. “I've heard it all before,” O'Malley says, dismissing the talk of the vice presidency and cabinet posts—as well as chatter that he's helping Hillary knock off some rust before she faces her eventual Republican opponent. “I'm not running to be a sparring partner.” He touts a record of getting things done that he says surpasses Clinton's achievements. Not that he's trying to draw attention to the fact that he's battling Clinton. “I'm not running against anybody,” he says.

“I do have a new perspective to offer,” O'Malley says, “and it is generational, and there is a big generational shift under way within our country.”

Indeed, his campaign is so remarkably passive-aggressive that he's reticent to even say the name Clinton, referring to her instead as “this year's inevitable front-runner.” For now, he prefers to draw contrasts with her by issuing slightly more liberal—and extraordinarily more detailed—policy papers on things like financial regulation and immigration.

But even if O'Malley takes off the gloves, it's hard to imagine how he'll hurt Clinton. “Sometimes people have asked me, ‘Are you to the left or to the right of her?’ and I respond, ‘I am to the forward of her,’ ” O'Malley says. “I arrived at these things before she did because I am of a different generation than she is.” He adds, “I do have a new perspective to offer, and it is generational, and there is a big generational shift under way within our country. The attitudes of people under 40 are very different than those of people over 50.” That last bit may be true—and it may also be a badly veiled jab at the 67-year-old Clinton—but does it make the case for O'Malley? After all, O'Malley is 52.

“Watch out for the dog shit,” O'Malley said, helping me to avoid an urban hazard near his campaign headquarters in Baltimore.

“You can't do anything about that?” I joked.

“If I were mayor, by God,” he replied.

In many ways, it seemed like he still was. “That's new, we just rehabbed that,” he said, pointing to a movie theater with an impressive marquee. A storefront sign boasting over thirty types of tea was a testament to his wisdom in long ago declaring the neighborhood an “arts district.”

It was law school that brought O'Malley to Baltimore after he'd grown up in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, D.C. He fell in love with both the city and a local girl, Katie Curran, whom he'd marry. In 1990, O'Malley was 27 and working as a prosecutor when he launched a quixotic bid for the state senate against an opponent who had the backing of the Baltimore political establishment. O'Malley's narrow defeat, by just forty-four votes, served notice to the city's political power brokers that he was a comer, and the next year, with a good deal of their support, he was elected to the city council. He quickly began mixing it up with his colleagues. When fellow councilman Bobby Curran (who happens to be Katie's uncle) got behind a housing commissioner that O'Malley opposed, he wrote a scathing letter accusing Curran of frequenting “the brothel of unprincipled and corrupt men.” “I've never gotten a letter like that from a colleague,” Curran told me, “much less from a family member!”

In 1999, after eight years on the city council, O'Malley ran for mayor. It was a gamble even more audacious than his bid for the state senate. Baltimore is a majority-black city, a place where conventional wisdom held that a white politician didn't have a prayer of winning citywide office. Baltimore was also a mess, with the highest violent-crime rate of any American city and a population shrinking by 1,000 people a month. O'Malley made a convincing promise to restore order. When he won the Democratic primary (and, by extension, the general election), the Washington Post headline said it all: WHITE MAN GETS MAYORAL NOMINATION IN BALTIMORE.

O'Malley governed as a wonky innovator, instituting a program called CitiStat to track city services. He tapped the legendary New York City detective Jack Maple, who created the strategies that many credited with leading to that city's dramatic drop in crime, to work his magic in Baltimore. And in the decade after O'Malley became mayor, Baltimore's crime rate fell by 48 percent, a success that he considered instrumental for real racial progress.

His accomplishments were even more impressive considering O'Malley's youth and inexperience. “Mike Bloomberg was well into his fifties and was a world-renowned businessman when he did what he did in New York,” says the urban-studies guru and best-selling author Richard Florida. “Martin did this in his thirties. He's really one of the great urban mayors of our time.”

His tactics earned him critics, too—most prominently David Simon. He charges that the reduction in crime O'Malley cites was really a result of fudging the numbers—and that his get-tough policing policies actually made things worse. “Marty left a mess between the community and police department,” Simon told me, “and destroyed the ability of the police department to do good work.”

The O'Malley camp is quick to dismiss Simon and his influence. “Simon likes to cast himself as an urban sage,” says a longtime O'Malley adviser, “but he's a Hollywood writer.” Another O’Malley aide asks, “What’s David Simon’s name recognition in Iowa?” The answer is that it’s probably even lower than O’Malley’s. But among liberals (and political reporters), Simon is more than a mere showrunner, and his critique has set the tone for much of the coverage of O'Malley's campaign—as well as revived old animosities.

Back when O'Malley was on the city council and Simon was working at The Baltimore Sun, the two were on the same side of things: both fierce critics of the police department. But after O'Malley was elected mayor, Simon trained his fire on him—a turnabout that O'Malley's people chalk up to a petty dispute over a journalistic project. Simon had asked to embed with the new mayor for a book he wanted to write, but O'Malley said no. So instead, Simon turned his attentions to television, eventually creating The Wire, which included the character of Tommy Carcetti, an ambitious city councilman who ascends to mayor and then governor. He was widely perceived to be a stand-in for O'Malley.

That Carcetti was callow and dishonest isn't what rankled O'Malley. Rather, it was the fact that Carcetti cheated on his wife, a story line written into the show right around the time a well-coordinated whisper campaign of marital faithlessness was being directed against O'Malley by his opponents. “I stopped watching when they got the Carcetti character,” Katie O'Malley told me. “It was trying to fuel this rumor of infidelity. There was one scene where he says good-bye to his wife and small kids, and the next scene he's in a hotel room with a woman. And I was like, ‘All right, this is bullshit.’ ”

O'Malley's image in this regard wasn't helped by the fact that he was still playing in his bar band, O'Malley's March—frequently in a sleeveless shirt that his aides worried detracted from his gravitas. Some in O'Malley's circle believed that the infidelity allegations—which were never close to being substantiated—gained traction only because of the music. “I told him, ‘You need to be home with your family,’ ” one former adviser says, “ ‘not in a bar in a muscle shirt with 3,000 screaming 20-year-old girls.’ ” (Another former aide notes the improbability of those rumors, given the Irish folk rock that O'Malley favored. “My guess is he was really not getting laid off that.”)

Simon told me Carcetti's cheating had nothing to do with O'Malley and that he bears no ill will over the scotched book project: “I don't care if the guy was fucking Jesus Christ or my brother, Gary. If he were standing up in public and arguing for these things I'm unalterably against, I'd stand up and say so.”

Still, for all the trouble his résumé in Baltimore now may give him with critics like Simon, the O'Malley campaign says it can glimpse a silver lining there, too. “I wouldn't go so far as to call it an opportunity,” says Steve Kearney, a longtime O'Malley adviser, “but if there continues to be a discussion of poverty and race in America, we've got a guy from Vermont and a woman who's been in a bubble the last twenty years. And then there's O'Malley, who was mayor of one of our toughest cities.” Which, in the current political climate, may be akin to a Clinton adviser claiming that she'll have an advantage if the campaign turns into a discussion of e-mail security.

In his kitchen, the candidate leaned over his coffeemaker and braced himself for the long day ahead. He was due soon at the headquarters of the National Education Association to lobby the teachers’ union for its endorsement. He was under no illusions—and didn’t even try, for a reporter’s benefit, to pretend—that he could beat out Clinton for it. “We call it the NEA non-endorsement meeting,” O’Malley said. “The only question now is whether they endorse her or don’t endorse for a while.” He took a slug of coffee from his Face the Nation mug. “But you sit and you pretend and you go through the process anyway.”

As O'Malley gave me a tour of his new digs, he seemed to be seeing the place for the first time. “I don't know who put all those pictures there,” he said as he examined a shelf in his study. Eventually he came across a small tchotchke, a woodblock that he cradled in his hands. His mind drifted back.

In 1988, before Gary Hart's presidential hopes were undone by the Donna Rice scandal, O'Malley had worked hard for the campaign. The woodblock had been a gift from Hart, a memento from the end. “This is one of five of these he gave to the last of us,” O'Malley said, recalling the fateful day. “He said he just wanted to see us for lunch. We went to a place called Strings, I think, which was a pasta place in Denver. He just started talking. About ten minutes into it, without any transition, Hart says, ‘I'm getting out of the race tomorrow.’ And he pulls out this bag, and he hands them all around to us.”

Whether, in his heart of hearts, Martin O'Malley holds that keepsake and envisions the day that he'll gather the last of his own staff for a similar chat, he doesn't say. For now, he's going to be the president. “We're going to win,” he told me. He can't afford to think anything else.